We all change. When you think about it. We are all different people, all through our lives. And that’s okay, that’s good you gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be.
INSIDE: The Anniversary: Reviewed. Bye, Matt Smith!
Where’s The Money Gone? Big Buster. The Time of The Doctor: Reviewed and Much More!
Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15
It’s That Time Again... First of all, I’d like to apologise for the lack of Issues in recent months, well, more half-a-year. Okay, over 12 months. Roughly. A mixture of real life and finding new and innovative ways of criticising BBC Worldwide for ripping us off, has been difficult to navigate. Instead of crashing into those rocks, we’ve taken a rest, sunbathed on the deck for a while and even done some extra pocket money work offshore, on the sly. Fortunately (or unfortunately) we’ve blown our pocket money and we’re back on board just in the nick of time, to set sail for the brand new series. What we have in this Issue is some articles we received in the last year or so, plus a few more recent bits about the upcoming series. So if it feels like you’re driving a cut-andshut saloon, put together by a random cardboard gangster in Eastenders, you know why. In the last few months, I’ve been trying my best to stay away from Doctor Who. Nothing sinister on my part, I mostly wanted a break from the constant nonsense that online fandom spouts these days. (This publication is included in that number, before you say anything!) It also seems that every online click could potentially lead to a massive spoiler somewhere and I would like to go into these new episodes, some may argue the most important run of the episodes since 2006 (David Tennant’s first series), without knowing anything. It got to the point during the last couple of years that
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watching new Doctor Who seemed like a bit of a chore, simply because I had a firm idea of what was happening, because I was browsing things online, trying in vain to get new material for the mag. During various times I became discontented with the whole concept of fandom and questioned why I wanted to do a fanzine if all people were interested in was personally abusing the people who work very hard to keep Doctor Who on the telly, or arguing and abusing each other with menacing-looking smiley-faces. Smiley faces that can move. I don’t want to feel like that, I want to feel the excitement as I did before I got an internet connection, when I didn’t know about forums and Facebook and Twitter. So that’s what I did and I feel all the better for it. Call it a mid-mid-life crisis (I’m not that old) but I’m over it and ready to be inspired by a new era. Actually, the feeling is very reminiscent of the weeks before I started this fanzine, at the start of the Matt Smith era. And if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back to not having an internet connection! Having seen him in many a role, all of them different, I feel no shame in possessing a bias of thinking that Peter Capaldi will be brilliant. When you’ve got someone who has a broad acting palette like Peter has, it’s easy to form an opinion why. A switch from the dramatic to comedic in seconds, it’s what The Doctor is. And the actor has done it all. From directing Oscar-winning short films,
Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 to playing major parts to playing minor supporting roles. He’s done it all. In most genres. He loves Doctor Who, he knows Doctor Who. Now he IS Doctor Who. The one aspect that I am anxious about though – is to see how different the show will be and whether it can progress and continue to improve. I honestly believe that we’ll see the best of the Moffat stewardship from now on – Capaldi is the type of Doctor that he wanted before Matt Smith after all. People like to point out that television programmes these days have a shelf-life, but Doctor Who has the potential to run for as long as it wants (consecutively, speaking). The ‘new series’ has been in production for over 10 years now (10 YEARS!) and I hope it can last, at the very least, for another th decade. The success of the 50
Anniversary pushed those foundation stones firmly into place, and this upcoming series can cement them in. Here’s hoping for another 10 years. With any luck. We’re back in action, to review the latest series, so if you’d like to send in your thoughts, please e-mail us at fishcustardfanzine@googlemail.com
As usual, we’re looking for anything about any aspect of Doctor Who that you fancy writing about. Obviously we’ll be reviewing each episode/the series as an whole, so that kind of material will be most welcome too! Please e-mail us for any further information you need. Cheers – and enjoy the upcoming series. I know I will! Danny
This Issue of Fish Fingers and Custard is brought to you from the same place as it was last time. Unless we’ve broken any laws, then it’s come from Piers Morgan’s house. Editor: Daniel Gee Contributors: David MacGowan, Simon J. Fox, Thomas Cookson, Hamish Crawford, Matthew Kresal, Tat, Bill Tyrell, Kieron Moore, Steve James and Jamie Beckwith Doctor Who is ©BBC (although this publication hasn’t got anything to do with the BBC. So don’t worry about you licence fee being wasted. It’s going on The Voice and Mrs. Brown’s Boys instead). FFAC117
The above (and all of this issue) was written before the airing of Series 8 and released in the run-up to ‘Death In Heaven’. Call us want you want, but at least we’re optimistic and honest. And extremely lazy.
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15
The Day of The Doctor(s)
An Unearthly Child (A 50 Anniversary Review)
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So what did you think of the 50th anniversary special eh? I can imagine that for most people the build up if not the episode and all the media frenzy around it was quite the event. Sadly for me though, I’ve no idea what it felt like as despite being a life-long British fan of the show, I was thousands of miles of rd way from my home in London on 23 November 2013 in a tiny little village in the mountains of Colombia. The timing couldn’t be helped and even if my parents’ house where I was staying had had BBC Latin America it wouldn’t have mattered because the TV signal was down in the village due to tropical storms. My girlfriend who was back home in th London spent the 50 anniversary with a mate of ours stalking locations from The
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War Machines and Remembrance of the Daleks before returning home to eat pizza and build up to Day of the Doctor by watching Day of the Daleks and The Happiness Patrol. By contrast I spent the day picking lemons and trying to cut swathes through elephant grass. I hadn’t come to Colombia unprepared though. Knowing I was going to be there during all the celebrations I had packed three DVDs to take with me; An Unearthly Child, The Five Doctors and Remembrance of the Daleks. So it was that at 5:15pm local time I sat down with my Mum and Dad (the one responsible for introducing me to Doctor Who in the first place when I was 6 years old and Sylvester McCoy was the incumbent incarnation) and the dogs, on the veranda as the sun began to set to watch An Unearthly Child. It seems clichéd to call this television history but it really was. In 1963 nothing
Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 like this had ever been seen before. 50 years later An Unearthly Child holds the test of time extremely well, even allowing for the fact that generations later we have become blasé about the TARDIS being bigger on the inside than it is on the outside and have never known what a police telephone box was other than the result of a faulty chameleon circuit. No matter how many times I watch An Unearthly Child I always find something new to think about. This time round I found myself really focused on Ian’s personal journey. As he and Barbara wait outside 76 Totters Lane and she expresses misgivings (“I feel frightened, as if we're about to interfere in something that is best left alone.”) Ian shrugs it off and says “I take things as they come.” Yet he is the one who has the most difficulty accepting the situation before his very eyes. He can’t comprehend the reality that Susan and her Grandfather are not of this world or believe that the inside of the TARDIS is not a trick and certainly not a time machine. Even when they finally arrive on the Neolithic plains inhabited by the Tribe of Gum (A name never used onscreen!) he still can’t get there, whereas Barbara instinctively feels the Doctor is telling the truth and more easily adapts to the situation despite her fears and lack of understanding of the hows and whys. Unlike some people I don’t think of An Unearthly Child as an amazing mind blowing opening followed by three weeks of cavemen before we get to the Daleks. The story with the Tribe of Gum is just as compelling and it’s completely in keeping with the whole ethos of the story. The Doctor, at this stage in his life not used to dealing with humans, openly refers to Ian and Barbara as “savages” by his standard and possessing less intelligence than even the children of his civilisation. So it is somewhat ironic that Ian and Barbara therefore arrive in a situation where they are confronted by
humanity’s ancestors, the archetypal savage; people operating on base instinct alone and lacking concepts of friendship, compassion or critical thinking. The difference here however is that whilst the Doctor made no pretence of wanting to understand humans, Ian and Barbara see something familiar in the Tribe of Gum and attempt to bring civilising (by the standards of 1963) values to them. The responses of the situation again have ironic echoes of each other, Za takes the bits of Ian’s lessons he can make best use of in order to still maintain his goal of being leader of the tribe, whilst the Doctor’s harsh exterior is softened over the course of this story and the following two as he comes to appreciate that he has misjudged his unwitting companions and perhaps humanity in general. One final thing to note; I think it’s probably Terrance Dicks in interviews and in his novelisation who has perpetuated the myth that the Doctor picks up a rock in order to smash Za’s brains in so they can get on their way. Perhaps that was the intent of the script but it is by no means so clear cut onscreen. Ian jumps to a conclusion and the Doctor’s explanation is obviously a feeble excuse but it doesn’t necessarily make the leap that the Doctor is willing and able to commit murder or at the very least grievous bodily harm and it doesn’t really tie in with the man we later get to know, though it is accepted that had he never met Ian and Barbara he may well not have ever become the man we know today in all his bowtie wearing glory. If you’ve never given classic Doctor Who th a chance, in this 50 anniversary year there really is no better place to start than An Unearthly Child. The ride began there, and you know what, I don’t think it’s ever going to end. • JAMIE BECKWITH
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 I Love. No Other Way
Given Day of The Doctor’s hype and global cinematic infiltration, was this all that good? No. Or at least not yet. But maybe, if given time... I was mostly entertained, but all too momentarily and hollowly. Hurt’s opener’s fantastic. Wisely kept shadowed, emphasising his scarred, tormented anonymity, living in darkness. His red-hued TARDIS in the centre of hell. Announcing a saviour, but no Doctor. His wall-blasting ‘No More’ is brilliant emotive visual storytelling, and ensnaring the Daleks’ attention marks Hurt’s superior chessmastership. The Daleks threatening Gallifreyan children is Moffat’s most manipulative moment, but I was punching the air when the TARDIS totalled them. But it’s overkill. You can’t top children in mortal danger as terrifying stakes go. Elsewhere it missed a plethora of chances to pay substantial tribute to 50 years. We should’ve seen the very first companion Susan protecting Gallifreyan children,to substantiate the otherwise hollow Coal Hill School cameo(or have Hurt’s Doctor recover the Moment there, like the Omega device).
appearing only in video inserts projected upon the dispersal chamber prison. But it was so obviously pre-recorded I couldn’t believe any immediate present danger to him. The old Doctors footage made to appear taking part conjures the same. There’s no interaction. It’s nonsensical too. Fans suggested each TARDIS took each Doctor ‘where he needed to go’. Perhaps the Moment brought them all here, but that’s never stated. We should’ve seen Billie merging with the TARDIS, Hartnell struggling to control it and Eleven’s telepathic cube materialising to instruct him. We should’ve seen Billie merging with the TARDIS, Hartnel struggling to control it, a telepathic cube materialising with instructions. But surely something’s wrong when the climactic alliance of Doctors feels out of place. Suggesting this doesn’t work as an anniversary story. It’s like it only remembers it is one in the last ten minutes.
Instead we’ve just got clipboard companion photos, Tom’s scarf, and a daft TARDIS dangling sequence seemingly in homage to Dragonfire’s cliffhanger. We could’ve had Tom voicing his diary entries on Dalek encounters read by Hurt. We got no such savourable moment. Quite the opposite. We can’t savour these past Doctor clips because we want them over before they inevitably compromise the suspension of disbelief Doctor Who Live suffered heavily from lacking Matt Smith in person, his image
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Tom’s cryptic cameo is too much to process and badly structured. He needed an earlier intriguing sighting (suggesting a Zygon or escaped painting or something brought back from the Doctor’s timestream), or a prior mention allowing Smith to say how being Curator was his dream retirement job, to
Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 contemplate and covert iconic noble faces of the past, in words Tom repeats back to him. Moffat’s anti-Williams stance prevents him giving the ‘picking favourites’ idea that little extra it needs. “Like a certain Time Lady you once knew.” The classic Doctor cameos were so marginalised that their belated appearance just felt jarring and clunky, unsupported and unwelcomed by the event’s commitment. I wanted to savour Tom Baker’s presence but couldn’t comprehend it. Having to think so hard about what Moffat intended here made me too conscious of the sloppy and crass author’s fiat and wish-fulfilment. So contrived it felt narratively coerced. It was clunky and played carelessly with the show’s future lore to a deal-breaking degree. The resolutions are problematic all round. Especially Kat’s sheer moronic willingness to nuke London to kill three Zygons. It’s a great crowd pleaser. Entertaining and wowing fans and new viewers alike. But I felt completely alienated from everyone else’s giddy high. I rewatched to same reactions. Entertained and intrigued, then hollowly disappointed after. Recalling Kaan Vural’s A Good Man Goes to War critique on stakes diminishing rather than rising, once we’d seen hell on Arcadia, everything after felt trivial, anticlimactic and dramatically thin. It felt costless and sanitised. Somehow it was less than the sum of its parts. Less a feature story, more two half-baked ones stitched together. Why were Queen Elizabeth or Zygons here? What better past homage’s and tributes
could have filled their time onscreen instead? Ultimately it was promise unfulfilled. The Doctor’s teased, dark secret without payoff was a bloodless nothing. Perhaps Gallifrey staying destroyed would’ve tarnished the celebratory anniversary atmosphere, but then why narratively revisit the Time War at all then? Well because it’s an event fans most wanted to see. But shunned the obvious chance to represent the show’s full history by teaming McGann with Susan. Instead he retconned a new past Doctor no-one's seen before, or thought existed, to usurp McGann's role. Supposedly to tell of the Doctor’s dark secret, only to reveal none. Hurt actually is just a regular Doctor, even though we lost McGann on the false pretext a regular Doctor wouldn't cut it here. If Moffat couldn’t imagine McGann committing genocide, why not make this about McGann’s redemption? Hurt’s conception became an ‘if it wasn’t broke why fix it?’deal-breaker. Eventually Moffat’s ‘everything you know is wrong’ contrivances become so exhausting you cease caring what this show’s even about anymore. Instead of following aforementioned logical opportunities to feature past elements, he delivered a tacked on, incomprehensible, frustratingly cryptic Tom Baker cameo to deliver more season arc teasers, rendering the scene near-impossible to swallow. Had Moffat avoided The Five Doctors’ format as an impediment to well-told, workable storytelling, only to write an unworkable story anyway? Over time my view became even more unforgiving. Hating it like the worst thing Moffat could’ve done that day. The worst story to happen to Who since 1984.
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Moffat’s TSV Interview haunted me anew. Would the man who trashed Hartnell and late-70’s Tom Baker as flubbing egocentric prima donnas, wilfully exclude them and erase Susan and Romana from the show’s history? Day had callously dismissed McGann from what should’ve been his story, without reason. To bring in a new Unbound replacement darker Doctor only to not even implement the punchline of the affair and instead redeem them at the end. I considered that unforgivable, missing the irony. What I’d hated wasn’t the story, but New Who’s hideous, horrid hype machine. The propaganda making this feel based on Moffat’s dumbest, most contrary sensibilities, and written in cynicism when it was in actuality written with sheer love. I should’ve been giddy with joy after watching. Instead I made the mistake of watching the ghastly afterparty which haunted my dreams. Then I reacted like I always do to fandom’s sinisterly cultish creepy sycophancy, by running instead toward the sincerer critical voiced until their snowballing issues with Day became mine. Why avoid the allegedly formulaic The Five Doctors, yet have Tennant here? Why’s Hurt presented in a Three Doctors redux ensemble when he carried no history or nostalgia? His decisions to keep McGann and downbeat endings from the war seemed outrageously scandalous, and keeping familiar Time Ladies Susan and Romana out too. His reasons seemed to point to one thing. He hated RTD’s Time War concept too politely to say so. He only wrote it for
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crowd-pleasing. That seemed the only reason behind everything here. Then I realised I’d completely missed something. When it hit me, my reaction was positively evangelical, like Genesis of the Daleks, Enlightenment and 1977’s Dracula. I came across something I couldn’t dismiss or reduce. It challenged me back, stood its ground, fiercely asserting it absolutely belonged here. It was its beating heart. “I ain’t no vision I’m the girl who Loves you Inside and out Backwards and forwards with my heart hanging out” Feist Sometimes love has no definable beginning. You grow slowly fond of someone, unconsciously re-seeking their company. That’s this story’s heart. The worst subplot was Tennant’s romance with the obnoxious Queen. Moffat seriously invited this woman to the party? No-one likes her. Tennant twice mistakes her for a Zygon elaborating on how stupid and smelly the real Queen is. She’s clearly aping Blackadder’s mad scary spoilt Queenie, the adorably monstrous incorrigible demanding woman-child. But she was curiously unpredictable, compelling. This Queen I just wanted off my screen. She made Mel tolerable. Queenie was just here to be Tennant totty, and to place Tennant right before End of Time. Is Moffat taking the piss?!The Five Doctors made no cumbersome efforts to explain which old stories each Doctor was lifted from between. It got on with telling the story.
Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Had Moffat excluded the other Doctors just to make room for padding? This particularly seemed written by someone who hated his job, and hated romance. Perhaps McGann’ would’ve suited a romance better. A beloved he take arms to protect. Possibly Romana. Maybe one of the Sisterhood. His Mina. Hell cast Judi Bowker as her.
chosen. She’d been downright iconic in what had been fandom’s most beloved story of 2011, even among Moffat haters, and it’d be nice to suggest she was almost the one who’d been there from the beginning. The Moment isn’t the TARDIS. But she is its ‘sister’. The Moment doesn’t just protect the Doctor, she protects his heart and soul, his conscience. This is what she was designed to be. The weapon only the most desperate and hopeless would use. Not knowing that by taking her into their hands, she would respond with love, and give them hope and protection. Promises that victory and their soul’s salvation will be done, even on the day it was impossible to get it right. Suddenly the story of the Doctor turning himself into a weapon he never had to use couldn’t be more right.
But Hurt’s being shown his younger self irresponsibly playing the field. Thus the Queen’s romance works by contrast. The true romance here is between Hurt and the Moment. A love beyond sexual, physical. She nurtures and protects him, goes distance to do almost the impossible for him. She can’t dissuade him from pressing the button so she tells him surviving will be his punishment, but as a preamble to showing him he does survive. I griped heavily about why Billie Piper had to play this role, not Lalla Ward or Carol Ann Ford. The latter would’ve substantiated the otherwise tokenist hollow Coal Hill School cameo. But centrally, the Moment’s a creature of foresight. Like Idris, her entire personality and perception is all very Timey-Wimey. So it makes more sense for the viewer that she adopt a form familiar only to the Doctor of the future, not someone from Hurt’s past. I wondered why Suranne Jones wasn’t
As for the Time War retconning, I’ve said elsewhere Moffat’s retconning is becoming obnoxious. And this seemingly went beyond Moffat making it up as he goes along, to him making up the backstory as he went along. I mean surely he had imagined and planned this one out since he first got the job. He wouldn’t make this up as he went along. Yet he’d created Hurt for a purpose he completely invalidated. Again begging why couldn’t McGann play that role? Make it as much about Classic Who’s end as New Who’s beginning. Why’s Hurt here, getting in the way? Here’s why. The Moment is love, and sometimes cruel to be kind. McGann’s romantic nature prevents him working here. Yes a romantic hero taking his rifle to defend what he loves is the first thing McGann would do, not last. But he’d also quickly elope with Piper. He’s too befriending, too easy to love and inspire hope in.
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Hurt distrusts her, he’s old, bitter, lonely, seemingly beyond love. She plays games, challenges him. She loves him, but knows he’ll only respond to confrontation. That’s why it’s Billie Piper here. Lalla’s too reassuringly familiar. Bille’s sinister. She shouldn’t be here. She recalls Rose’s stalkerishly creepy moments, yet she’s not Rose. She saves Hurt’s soul. Cynical casting ensured this love letter to the show’s conscience reached the widest audience. Not just we anoraks for whom the ending reconciles with Classic Doctors after erasing and decanonising the divide.Delivering the clean slate and reasserted purpose the show’s needed since Castrovalva. Even redeeming Tennant’s horrid treatment of Wilf. Gallifrey’s most feared weapon was its kindest. • THOMAS COOKSON The Halcyon Days
Ah, you kids with your flash-bang 3D Anniversary Specials, ducking and whooping as Daleks come flying at you from the screen. I saw one or two of you reaching out to touch the sonic screwdriver as it was waved in your faces, only for your fingers to meet nothing but the dust in the air. Such is the stuff of dreams, intangible and illusory, but enough magic in it to quicken the heart and put hope in the spring of your youthful steps. What a show it was - three Doctors ten feet tall on the silver screen - and their adventures more vibrant and breakneck than ever. I was watching the parents as much as what was happening on the screen. I caught that flicker of a smile as the old baddies reared their ugly heads once again. No doubt it took you back to when you were your daughter’s age, and
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now it all has the added bonus while you watch your little darling’s react to new adventures in time and space. Me watching you watching them watching the screen. Just as it should be. And then the bonus - a surprise reappearance by a beloved Doctor, once youthful and dashing and saving the Universe, but now unmistakably human and old, no matter how much we wish him to be a Time Lord for real. He was only on the screen for a brief scene, but during that three minutes or so, he made our hearts dance and our pulses quicken. I heard your gasps when he first spoke in those unmistakable dulcet tones, don’t think I didn’t. I was proud of you all. Yes, proud. Proud for the very fact that people so young could even know who he was, let alone love him as I do. Matt Smith, you’ve still got it. Long before Tyger-Drew Honey became the Doctor, before Lawrence Fox, and even before Peter Capaldi, Matt Smith was the Doctor. He was my Doctor. I know you’re rolling your eyes as you read this, thinking that you’ve heard it all before. Here’s yet another old codger bleating on about how Hide gave him nightmares and how Vincent and the Doctor made him cry. And it’s trueN we all did cry a lot back in those days. There was lots to cry about back then. It was the Age of Austerity that you learn about in school, and look how that endedN Yet, through it all, for thirteen Saturdays and Christmas Day each year, Doctor Who was essential viewing. We would sit down as a family and watch it together. I would chase my little brother around the house pretending to be a Dalek, and once Dad had had enough, he would gently suggest we pretend to be Weeping Angels instead. We were lucky enough to see the
Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Doctor’s speech at Stonehenge broadcast for the first time. I got chills when the Ice Warrior stalked through the submarine, hunting down Russian submariners. And I distinctly remember explaining the plots to my Dads. I do suspect, however, that my father only watched in case Captain Jack showed up again. Whoever that was.
remember. When you all gasped in the cinema when he made his cameo, for one glorious shining moment, I loved you all. Each and every one of you. You made an old man very, very happy. Thank you
Looking back, I can proudly say that I was there. Providence had caused me to be a kid during Matt Smith’s time as the Doctor, and that’s one thing I will always
• SIMON J FOX
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15
The Anniversary Companions (No Spoilers)
An Adventure In Space and Time It was a bit incredulous of us to say in the last Issue that we were ‘probably looking more forward to this drama about the making of Doctor Who, than the Anniversary episode itself. As it turned out – the episode was a storming success, but, as we hoped all along, so was an Adventure In Space and Time. David Bradley, fresh from cementing his ‘creepy bad guy’ image from his recent stints in both Doctor Who and Game of Thrones, plays William Hartnell so beautifully. The drama is bookended by Hartnell, preparing to film his final scene as The Doctor. It delves into how the programme came to be, the idea from Sydney Newman, his appointment and kindly relationship towards Verity Lambert, who probably saw Doctor Who as her first – and last – opportunity to make it as a television producer. It captures the struggle for a young woman trying to get into television extremely well, though I did like the vague suggestion that doors weren’t opened to her, not particularly just because she was a woman, but because she was young and inexperienced. Jessica Raine is likeable as Verity and it’s easy to see why Sydney put his faith in her and why she had such a successful career (with the drama 95% true, I’d imagine the characters are pretty much spot-on, anyway!) As mentioned just a few lines ago, Bradley portrays Bill Harntell so brilliantly and I’m delighted that we’ve seen another side to the man who made The Doctor. The vast majority of the drama was true-to-life, one-or-two exceptions can be made for dramatic purposes of course, including the heart-breaking line that Bill utters at home, as he tells his wife that he won’t be The Doctor anymore, the line connecting the old Doctor Who with the new. And one particular scene at the end – which I hear has been received with mixed feelings from fans, but I love it. It tells him – and us watching at home in 2013 – that Doctor
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Who will go on and it’s due to Bill’s enthusiasm and love for a character that he made an household name. Many things have been forgotten about Bill, it’s all ‘ooh Grumpy old man’. But you never hear about his kindness towards his fellow actors, or his fastidious approach towards his work and his concern for children watching (I need to know how my TARDIS works – which switch does what. The children will know!) I think this is clearly an high-point in Mark Gattiss’ career, he’s mentioned that this is the story that he’s wanted to tell for years – and he did it brilliantly. So thank-you Mark, thankyou Sydney, thank-you Verity. Thank-you Waris. Thank-you Mr Hartnell. Thank-you to everyone who has worked on our beloved television programme and making it the success it is.
The Fiveish Doctors Twitter, as you probably know already, throws up all kinds of rubbish. When a new account entitled ‘Fish Doctor’ started to appear, as promoted by Colin Baker and Peter Davison on Twitter, people started to wonder; What is this Fish Doctor all about? We learnt the answer as the anniversary loomed into focus – Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester th McCoy and Paul McGann appearing in a spoof about their efforts in appearing in the 50 Anniversary story. Littered with all sorts of amazing cameos and many a scene that sends almost everyone up (even the fans – the whole, are you coming back to Doctor Who? questions over the years must have played some bearing in this idea!) it does a great job of celebrating Doctor Who, but poking good-natured fun at it at the same time. The joke of McGann helping the other Doctors in their quest (subject to work, obviously) was made all the more funnier, when in real life, McGann couldn’t appear in the video more than he did, as he was actually working! Steven Moffat and Russell T. Davies were particular highlights for me too and fair play to them for being great sports and participating. Although I don’t think Moffat knew that he was being filmed, if you know what I mean. If you haven’t seen An Adventure In Space and Time and/or The Fiveish Doctors - what th are you doing reading this – go and watch it! They make the perfect companions to the 50 Anniversary Doctors.
Doctor Who: The Afterparty Shite. No need to air.
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15
Fixing Toys and Fighting Monsters I loved Matt Smith’s first series of Doctor Who, and will stick up for it to this day. Series 5 got the balance of plot arc and character just right, a grand fairytale adventure with surprising twists, an interesting new take on the Doctor, and finely developed relationships at its heart. It was after that when Steven Moffat’s showrunning went awry for me, with series 6 being an utter mess and series 7’s ‘Impossible Girl’ arc simply uninteresting. And now, three and a half years later, we’ve reached the other bookend, the final episode of Doctor Smith, who bowed out in this year’s Christmas special, The Time of the Doctor. This episode aimed to tie up Matt’s era and to see him out with a bang, harking back to all the important memories of the past few years. Did it recapture what I initially loved about this Doctor? Well, yes, but also, largely, no. After an audacious opening declaring that after a multi-Doctor story we’re having one of Moffat’s multi-monster stories, The Time of the Doctor descended into silly farce for the first fifteen minutes. And not the good kind of silly farce, but a crude and not really very funny attempt at humour in which we’re constantly told that the Doctor is actually naked. We didn’t even get to see any arse. Nevertheless, the story picked up a bit when the Doctor and Clara finally set foot in the town of Christmas. With costumes reminiscent of 2010’s best Christmas special ever, A Christmas Carol, the setting for the Doctor’s final battle was a brilliant piece of production design, a snow-capped fairytale village encased in near-permanent darkness. A lot of people seem to have taken against the voiceover, but for me it built upon a really nice atmosphere, and the Doctor growing old while defending this town against all his enemies was a neat way to sign off this Doctor’s adventures – there was even a nice throwback to the very beginning in the Doctor befriending young Barnable, who waited for him as did Amelia Pond. I also did really like the way this adventure brought together plot points from throughout Matt’s era, not only bringing back the crack in time but also explaining “Silence will fall when the question is asked” in a way much more satisfactory than I ever expected Moffat to manage. OK, not everything made sense – brushing over the Silence as a bunch of genetically-engineered confessional priests from the future does beg the question of why a bunch of genetically-engineered confessional priests from the future would have bothered to go back in time and influence human history from the days of the Stone Age – not exactly the most logical plan to kill the Doctor, is it? But the big problem with The Time of the Doctor is that, while I really like a lot of the ideas in it, it failed to engage me on an emotional level. The scenes that were meant to be sadN weren’t. And those are the scenes that are important in a regeneration episode. Remember Rose distraught at having been sent home because the Doctor didn’t want her to die alongside him? Heartbreaking, wasn’t it? That basically happened again, and this time there wasn’t a wet eye in the house (especially bad considering I’d been softened by Toy Story 3 and a good deal of wine). Remember the Tenth Doctor breaking down in the café with Wilf? And then his final scene, promising the young Rose she’d have a great year? That’s the kind of beautiful writing a regeneration episode deserves, and The Time of the Doctor’s brief attempts at anything similar fell flat. The fact that it’s half as long as the previous regeneration story shouldn’t have been the issue; if Moffat had just taken out some of the unnecessary stuff, like the entirely irrelevant confrontation with the Weeping
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Angels, who were cheapened in The Angels Take Manhattan and haven’t been scary since, or the unfunny farce at the beginning, then he’d have had room to take his time with the character stuff and maybe make the episode a bit more affecting. But even that might have been a lost cause, for this episode was far too late for me to engage with Clara as a character. The problem with Clara is that she’s very much the generic companion and there’s no continuous character arc to get behind. The presentation of her family, introduced as she serves them Christmas dinner, seems entirely disconnected to anything that’s been mentioned of them in previous episodes. Her father’s even played by a different actor, and I bet most of the audience didn’t notice, due to the very little shits we’ve been led to give – a vast let down from Russell T Davies’ skill in giving the companion’s families rounded and interesting characters. In their brief appearances here, Moffat tries to emulate what Davies did – “Look, they’re watching Strictly, that means they’re relatable!” – but fails miserably, with these characters both coming from nowhere and going nowhere. As well as Clara, this episode introduced us to Tasha Lem, ‘Mother Superious of the Papal Mainframe’. Though I did appreciate Orla Brady’s Irish accent, that was the extent to which I enjoyed Lem, who seemed familiar in many ways. As well as fitting that overused Moffat trope, an old friend of the Doctor, her dialogue felt like it had been written for River Song – “Flying the TARDIS was always easy. It’s flying the Doctor I never quite mastered” and the Doctor’s line “You’ve been fighting the psychopath inside you all your life.” And yes, of course she tried to seduce the Doctor, later being pounced on by him. Moffat’s repetitive and demeaning treatment of female characters as nothing more than his space-based sex fantasies seems to be getting worse all the time. At least we had Handles, the Eleventh Doctor’s longest serving companion. OK, I actually think there is a good idea in having the Doctor carry around a Cyber-head as a personal computer – it’s reminiscent of K9, some of their interaction in the opening sequence was quite funny, and at least it stopped him from over-using the sonic screwdriver for once. But, come on, were we really meant to be sad at his death scene? It’s another example of Moffat’s hyper-pacing spoiling the effect – if we’d known Handles for longer, maybe this scene would have had a chance at working. So what of the Doctor himself, and his regeneration? Playing it loose with the character’s history so that the Eleventh Doctor is actually the Thirteenth Doctor was a bold move by Moffat, and one I have no problem with in theory – the show was always going to make something up to get past the classic bit of continuity that is the regeneration limit, and it might as well do this sooner rather than later to shut up those who keep going on about how Doctor Who is going to end. The problem is introducing the fact that this is the Doctor’s last incarnation and then wrapping it up in one episode is very sudden for such a major event in his life. This finale could have been more effective had the seeds been planted earlier. Why no mention of this when the Doctor was so worried about his death in series 6, or when faced with his own grave in The Name of the Doctor? That aside, the new set of regenerations meant that Smith’s Doctor got rather spoiled, having not one, but two regeneration scenes: a massive fuck-off Dalek-destroying tornado of a regeneration, followed by a much more personal handover in the TARDIS. This scene had a lot of nice touches – the Doctor’s “I will not forget one line of this” monologue, the bewigged ghost of Amy Pond, the dropping of the bow tie, the song from The Rings of Akhaten (yes, I still like that episode). And yet, despite all of this, I felt, again, significantly
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 less moved than the fan I was three years ago, who loved the Doctor of series 5, would have wanted the fan I am today to be. And so it is with an episode which nicely ties up the era both visually and narratively but is a significant emotional letdown that we say goodbye to Matt Smith. A very fine actor, and an occasionally brilliant Doctor, who was increasingly dumped with problematic scripts. At least anniversary special The Day of the Doctor didn’t disappoint, and at least we’ll always have such classics as The Eleventh Hour and Vincent and the Doctor to remember Eleven by. Matt, you will always be the Doctor. And now, so will Peter Capaldi – who failed to make much of an impression in a very short final scene, to be honest. I wanted something a bit more daring than the now-conventional comment about part of his new body and the realisation that the TARDIS is crashing again, albeit less dramatically than last time. I did like his stare, though. I hope he does a lot of that staring. • KIERON MOORE (http://www.kieronmoore.com)
“I’m sorry Mr. Smith, pretending to Time-Travel and to fight Monsters isn’t a transferable job skill”
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15
A Anniversary Diary (One idiot’s stream-of-thought diary of the days leading up to the 50th Anniversary) 14th November 2013 Day 1 – The Power of Three SQUEE Decide to start this diary. See that THREE people are saying that The Day of The Doctor Prequel has been posted and is ‘the best ever’. Three people eh? It must be good if not a single one of them are moaning about it! I’m normally a bit indifferent to these prequels, they’re okay I suppose, but nothing to get excited out. I decide to check it out right away. OH MY! McGann! Paul FLIPPING McGann! He’s only here, being all Doctory on screen for the first time in 17 years (Was 1996 really 17 years ago?) Bloody hell! The Night of The Doctor is indeed the best ‘prequel’ ever. No, scratch that, it’s the best rd piece of new Doctor Who EVER! (Well, maybe until the 23 !) Not only does it give us fans something that we’ve been moaning for since 2005, it actually ties into The Day of The th Doctor and John Hurt’s character. We’ve still no idea who he is exactly (9 Doctor or as he’s billed – The War Doctor?) But at this point I don’t care – PAUL McGANN IS BACK! AND he mentioned some of his Big Finish audio companions! Those Keepers of The Canon (praise be to them, Lords and Lordesses of Doctor Who Law. Praise be) are probably going berserk at the thought of including spin-offs into the story of The Doctor! What a great little story The Night of The Doctor was too. I was a bit too excited to understand what was happening first time around, so I watched it another 12 times just to be sure. With Paul only being on screen just the once previously, I must admit that it took some getting used to - actually seeing him playing The Doctor (rather than just hearing him) needed some adjustment. But he was great. He had some great lines (“I’m a Doctor – but probably not the one you were expecting”) and Karn and the Sisterhood were back! And even Cass seemed like a likeable companion-type (and not because Emma CampbellJones who played her, favoured one of my tweets!) Shame about what happened to the pair of them, but from these 7 or so minutes, we can see why Paul fits the role of The Doctor so perfectly. And credit to Steven Moffat for such a great script. Any spin-off funds must be spent on McGann. A web-series or something? Then again, part of me wants this to be it. That memory of my reaction seeing him as The Doctor again. We only had the TV Movie yesterday, now we have this. More could spoil it. And we’ve always got Big Finish to listen to!
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 I’m delighted for Paul, the show, the fans and everyone who I told. All three of them. And they all seemed pleased, even the one doesn’t even watch Doctor Who! It’s even Paul’s birthday today too, that must be why this was released ahead of schedule. That and a potential leak. Whoops. What a great present anyway! Later I settle down to watch ‘The Science of Doctor Who’ with Professor Brian Cox. I love how it seems he’s contractually obliged to always precede his name with ‘Professor’ in case of a mix-up with the actor Brian Cox. Or maybe he’s just showing off. Or maybe that’s his actual birth name. It’s an interesting watch, even though I didn’t have a clue what was going on half the time. Like in Ghost Light. I’m quite glad now that we have things ‘Wibbly-Wobbly-Timey-Wimey’ and other such phrases that are used to describe things in Doctor Who, if it takes an apparent Professor 20 minutes to explain how a clock works. Nice scenes with The Doctor too. That’s it really.
Day 2 – Celebrities In Need Children In Need has got a bit of criticism from some people in recent years for their facilitating of celebrities desperate to get back into the limelight. I’ll never forget Peter ‘Victor in Love and Monsters’ Kay plugging his live tour after they showed his charity video on the annual telethon. It seems Doctor Who has fallen into this trap, showing a bit of an upcoming episode to gain maximum exposure. I’m not necessarily against Doctor Who getting information out there of course, but I think it’ll be better if something else was done, to actually do something different for the night, instead of hoaring out a few minutes of an episode. Maybe get as many Doctor’s on stage as possible like they did with on Children In Need in 1985? That was great. Pertwee and Troughton even came up with an impromptu argument, in character. It’s brilliant, check it out on YouTube! The night is for a great cause of course, and I hope the money raised goes to help people who need it, but it doesn’t stop me feeling, well, meh, about the whole night, when the majority of celebrities are only there to get their faces (and products) on screen. It should be all about raising money for good causes, using your celebrity and profile to help to make a difference, not getting yourself in the public eye just to sell an extra ticket, or get an extra viewer to watch your show, so they will be sold needless tat at some point in the future, which you’ve got image rights to, of course. I also could have done without seeing the Day of The Doctor scene to be honest, I wasn’t really enamoured by it and it looked to have been heavily edited anyway! Hopefully I’ll cheer up tomorrow!
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Day 3 – A Lazy Day Today was one of those days that I literally didn’t do anything that involves Doctor Who. Okay, that isn’t strictly true, I started the Terry Nation biography by Alwyn W. Turner and even though I’m still in the early part, it’s proving to be an interesting read and very informative about how television and radio worked in the 1950’s, as well as the man himself. Also you could say that today was a ‘preparation day’ because I was recovering from staying up to watch Children In Need and preparing for a trip to Manchester tomorrow to see an audience with Waris Hussein, the first ever director of Doctor Who. So not that lazy, really!
Day 4 – A Visit From Waris Had a nice day out today, as we visited Manchester to see a talk given by Waris Hussein. Everyone was visibly excited and when he arrived (late train!) and as you’d expect, he had the audience eating out of his hand with tales from the very beginning of Doctor Who and spoke well about the upcoming An Adventure In Space and Time and his involvement in it. He was full of praise for the new series, Mark Gatiss and even contributed to rumours that they probably haven’t found his other (missing) Doctor Who serial ‘Marco Polo. He spoke about the story with such a love, I felt a bit sorry for him that it was missing! It’s certainly something that’s high amongst the list of missing stories we’d like to see anyway! He also spoke in gracious terms of William Hartnell, debunking the myth amongst fans that he was racist, Waris spoke of a kind man, one who may have been stuck in his ways, but one who had time for his peers and one who loved his work so much. In what seemed like no time at all (but probably was an hour and a bit) it was time to go, I got my book of an Unearthly Child signed by him and went on my way, with memories of a great event and new thoughts in my head about the early years of Doctor Who.
Day 5 – The Random Day I figured if I was going to make this diary sound more interesting (AND to actually do something to celebrate Doctor Who) I decided to do an ambitious project where I had to watch a story from each Doctor, rd 2 a Doctors a day, up until the 23 and write a bit of a blog about them on the fanzine website. I’ll never do it. It works like this – I wrote out numbers corresponding to each (existing) story and put them in the lid of a Quality Street tub (that must be about 10 years old itself. Time travel.) and drew them out, one per Doctor. It drew some interesting results to say the least! I counted Shada and counted each ‘story’ from The Trial of A Timelord separately, hence I got th Terror of The Vervoids. And for the 8 Doctor, I included The TV Movie and The Night of The Doctor in the draw, as well as his
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Big Finish audios (as we know now – they ARE canon!) and hence I got The Eight Truths/Worldwide Web. Here is the full list; Today The Aztecs The Domaintors Tuesday Terror of The Autons Shada (yes – it is canon) Wednesday The Five Doctors Terror of The Vervoids Thursday Time and The Rani The Eight Truths/Worldwide Web Friday The Unquiet Dead The Unicorn And The Wasp AndN.The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe. I’m sure you’ll agree – some stinkers in there and one or two decent ones. I’m pleased that I got The Five Doctors (under the circumstances) and The Unquiet Dead! So after watching (and reviewing – see www.fishcustardfanzine.co.uk) the stories. I enjoyed The Aztecs the first time I’ve seen it, but I’ve never seen The Dominators before and despite reading some negative reviews, I enjoyed parts of the story. Okay 5 parts is far too long, meaning that the story gets too far strung out, but there’s elements of fun in there – I enjoyed Arthur Cox as Cully and it was great to read that he actually came back to Doctor Who – playing Mr Henderson in The Eleventh Hour! The Quarks (billed as ‘the next Daleks’ at the time) were an interesting idea but not well realised enough. It’s still fun seeing them bundle around though! You can’t go wrong with The Aztecs – a story with charm, good villains and hilarious fight scenes. I think the two represent the good, the bad and the ‘so bad it has to be good’, of 60’s Doctor Who! But if you want more thoughts on these – see the website!
Day 6 – Continuing Adventures Today has seen me continue with ‘The Randomiser’ by watching the stories Terror of The Autons and Shada. They’re both a somewhat mixed bag, which isn’t surprising for the latter, as half of it was unmade! I’m also hearing a few rumours about the Anniversary episode, half of them sound bollocks, but I put everything to one side, because at this stage I don’t really believe anything I read.
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Day 7 – Great Chaps, All of Them The Five Doctors is the standout highlight of today’s Randomiser. Believe it or not, I didn’t get the hype when I first saw this. Call it the affect of the anniversary, but this time round I really enjoyed it. I ‘got it’ at last. Sadly, this was followed by Terror of The Vervoids, which despite one or two decent moments, proves to be unforgettable. Here’s hoping that tomorrow will be betterN
Day 8 – Oh My Giddy Aunt
2 days to go. I catch up with last night’s One Show that was shown on BBC One, as it was crammed full of Doctor Who goodness, along with Jenna Coleman and John Hurt chatting on the sofa, or settee as I’m told to call it. The highlight of this programme, wasn’t any of the clips, or anything that Steven Moffat (who was being interviewed in the TARDIS) said, it was a Cyberman, dressed in a pink feather boa, fainting and falling onto a Radiophonic Workshop band-member’s drum kit. If that sentence doesn’t sum up Doctor Who, I don’t know what does. Thankfully, one of the other guests on the show was the head of the NHS in England, talking about A&E waiting times. Lucky he was on hand, really. An Adventure In Space and Time was everything I expected it to be and more. Glued to the television screen (not literally) from the first minute to the last, I laughed, cheered and (almost, never) cried. A beautiful piece of (historical) television that provides a nice-tasting base for the Anniversary cake. I just hope that the actual episode isn’t a rank cherry that will be squashed on top... Oh and I watched Time and The Rani too. Yeah.
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Day 9 – The End of Time th
I complete my Randomiser watching, or in the case of the 8 Doctor, listening. One day to go. It feels like I’m going on holiday, then as dread starts to seep in (what if it’s crap? Can I live with myself? Yes, yes I can. It’s a television programme, you idiot) – it feels like I’m going to be sentenced tomorrow. I’ve not done anything wrong. I’m not a murderer or a Star Trek nut or a flasher, or anything so degrading. One day to go...
Day 10 – The Day of The Day of The Doctor Wow. I know instant reactions are sometimes misleading, especially when it’s as big as an occasion as this, especially when you watch it on the big screen (in 3D) – but I’m convinced I’ve just seen the best episode of Doctor Who, ever. Okay, that’s probably not strictly true, but it surely is up there with the best episodes since 2005! I watch it again, along with other bumf from the day, including Doctor Who Live: The Afterparty. Which as you’d expect, was a complete waste of time. I browse the internet and everybody and I mean EVERYBODY is genuinely thrilled with the episode. And equally appalled at the ‘Afterparty’, which isn’t even worth mentioning ever again, even though I suspect that sabotage was going on during the live link to One Direction, just to make them look stupid. I hope so. Again, a good potion of this joy has probably got everything to do with the big day and what it means, but if the episode truly was terrible, the reaction would have different. Wouldn’t it??? I round off the night by watching The Fiveish Doctors on a loop on the Red Button. Even that’s brilliant. Makes you wonder why they can’t produce this quality with the average Doctor Who episode, doesn’t it? Grinning like a loon, I have a browse on the internet again and it’s universal praise all round. I finally go to bed. At 5am!
Day 11 – The Day After The Day of The Doctor I’m more physically exhausted than a Dalek who can’t control his casing. It doesn’t stop me stalking The Doctor though, all 13 of them. What a day that was! I watch the episode again and catch up with various reviews, interviews, articles, podcasts and internet posts. I can’t see much negativity in there. Everyone seems to be really pleased: the fans, the BBC, newspapers. I run a test to see if I’m still awake. I am. After apologising to the neighbours, running back into the house and putting my clothes back on after said test, I start to come to terms with it all. Doctor Who fans (mostly) agreeing? Everyone being friends, holding (virtual) hands and singing the praises of the Production Team and the BBC. This can’t last, can it? No, somebody mentions something about canon and arguments quickly break out as the day comes to close. Ah, that’s more like Doctor Who! And you know what? I probably won’t have it any other way.
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15
The Drunken Giraffe (Some reviewers wax lyrical about the Matt Smith Era)
Farewell, Raggedy Man Let me set the coordinates for April 3, 2010 (you may think it’s more of a table wine, but bear with me). On TVs and iPlayers across the world, an actor so unknown, even his name sounds like it’s got a chameleon circuit around it, has put on a bow tie and tweed jacket, and completely stolen the spotlight from universally beloved television star David Tennant in his first episode as Doctor Who. The last time the stakes were that high and it happened so overwhelmingly was December 28, 1974. The subsequent two or three or four seasons/half-seasons that followed have put a different complexion on this (and somehow it seems emblematic of the Smith/Moffat era that even the terminology is enough to start an argument). Ratings remain high—and gosh, that anniversary gave everything a boost—and no one can deny Doctor
Who is as well-produced as ever and gets the best guest stars if Downton Abbey can’t snag them first, and all that. But somehow, somewhere along the way N well, someone let some air out of those tires. Before we get to that, I’ll put my cards on the table: Smith’s first season (Fnarg, Five, One, Thirty-Two, I’m in no mood for st these arguments) is my favourite 21 century Who stint, and one that is up there with Pertwee’s first, a good five of Tom’s, Davison’s and McCoy’s third, or Eccleston’s single or Tennant’s second. To my mind, in 2010 Steven Moffat amply rose to Russell T. Davies’ showrunner challenge: The Eleventh Hour and The Time of Angels are copper-bottomed classics, The Big Bang actually has a story (name another season finale that manages that!); and it’s only lack of time that hamstrings The Beast Below. He also squeezed formatenriching one-offs from Gareth Roberts, Simon Nye, and Richard Curtis (the
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 sheer quality gap between even the worst moments of Vincent and the Doctor and The Boat That Rocked should earn Moffat some kind of scriptshepherding medal).
universe made him seem more personally affected, and his convictions more keenly fought over. A Doctor who, in the wake of dark evidence to the contrary, remained committed to making sure that pile of good things wasn’t forgotten. Amy and Rory worked wonderfully well in this context too, supporting and believing in the Doctor (which, by season’s end, quite literally saved his universe). By virtue of their idealistic humanity (and specifically Rory’s ordinariness), in turn gave him something worth believing in. Even River Song—who was, let’s remember, a fresh and intriguing new addition to the mythology –worked surprisingly with the Doctor because of his aloof awkwardness.
In Matt Smith’s Doctor, yes, there was a welcome boost of eccentricity. But in 2010 I was most struck by how Moffat consistently knocked the Doctor back: ethical quandaries and the pettiness of humanity seemed to beleaguer him more than those irrelevantly shiny new Daleks. The Star Whale in The Beast Below, the Dream Lord’s cruel dismantling of his ego in Amy’s Choice, Ambrose’s depressingly credible bone-headed intolerance in Cold War. For any era of Doctor Who, Vincent and the Doctor’s conclusion, where no amount of lifeaffirming time travel can change a depressed genius committing suicide in 1890 is courageously ugly, unvarnished. The sonic screwdriver wouldn’t be much use against such troubles, and so Smith was a Doctor armed only with the same weapons as any intelligent person— charm and wit and incurable optimism. This had been there with Eccleston and Tennant’s Doctors, yes—The Parting of the Ways, Voyage of the Damned and Midnight, among others, hinged on the Doctor’s flaws—but Smith’s less selfrighteous, almost Socratic attitude to the
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Perhaps I’m also putting my cards on the table when I say that nothing since then has capitalized on any of this. I won’t deny there haven’t been incredible episodes: A Christmas Carol, The Doctor’s Wife, The God Complex, Hide, Day of the Doctor, and N well, I’ll be generous and throw in The Crimson Horror, but you can whistle for Angels Take Manhattan. These rank with the best of any of the other ten blokes’ Doctorates—but somehow seem like fluky one-offs rather than confident returns to form. What came to be a tradition in Doctor Who Magazine— Moffat’s season-ending interview when he admitted things got away from him a bit and he’d try harder next year— seemed all too reflective of the all-overthe-place grab-bag that Doctor Who now offered in place of a coherent direction. You may think my disappointment was inevitable given what I enjoyed about the 2010 episodes. Between A Christmas Carol and The Impossible Astronaut, there seemed to be a directive to dial down the talk and aim more for the kids (despite the Daily Mail’s fears,
Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Impossible Astronaut is the kind of xenophobic B-movie SF that Doctor Who has parodied from The Ambassadors of Death to Aliens of London). Why did this happen? In 2010’s triumphant, new-era haze, no one was singing the praises of Victory of the Daleks or The Vampires of Venice—at best, they managed some muted “It was all good fun”-type comments from fans tired of seeing them treated as pin-cushions. So why did ‘slutty titles’ and ‘movie poster idea’ became the norm? It would be like Hinchcliffe patterning the 1976 season on The Android Invasion (ooh, that’s another one that pre-parodied Impossible Astronaut). Why were the quiet moments and the drama—that clicked so well with Smith’s layered performance—thrown out and turned to 100% gimmicky quirkiness? Why did that charming and mad and slightly dangerous Doctor get shedloads of quirks dumped on top of him, at his worst devolving into an alien version of How I Met Your Mother’s Barney Stinson? That Smith acquits himself as often as he does, given two seasons of scripts that mistake exaggeration for comedy and shouting for drama, is a testament to how right he is as the Doctor. Ultimately, Smith’s last two episodes are something of a return to form after scripting autopilot throughout that miserly 2013 not-quite-season. His Doctor’s clowning is meaningful when put against the enormity of his loss, or the possibility of its reclamation. That Day of the Doctor had as much love and attention paid it is sweetly apparent on the screen—as it will likely be the Smith episode most often rewatched and analysed in years to come (just as The Five Doctors has been since 1983), everyone involved deserves credit for getting it so very overwhelmingly right. On balance, this was the right priority. Although it didn’t feel like that when I
was sitting through The Rings of Akhaten. It’s a shame that even The Time of the Doctor doesn’t quite hit the final note it should. I was heartened to see the Doctor live a life, and get to experience the cheers of children metatextually written into the show—on balance, more poignant than dangling from a radio telescope or even the glass cabinet of doom from The End of Time. It’s telling indeed that the smaller stuff—Clara’s bereft Christmas dinner, the Doctor facing his death with a weary dignity— was what Moffat got right. By contrast, his attempts at season-finale, arc-tastic space opera—from the Time Lords to his, count it, fourth attempt to decently explain the Silence—crawl under the story’s carpet out of embarrassment. It will be interesting to see how these stories age and mature—without the week-to-week quality see-saws and cack-handed ‘mysteries’ and ‘riddles’ and ‘impossibles’ (I really am hoping for a ban on that word; it’s become as grating as ‘iconic’ was during the Davies years). Maybe the best sediments of Chateau Smith will sift to the top. I’ll always remember that incredible beginning and the better glimmers of the subsequent seasons. And I’ll definitely continue to celebrate an actor who embodied that immortal Terrance Dicksauthored, Day of the Doctor-quoted creed—“Never cruel or cowardly; never gives up and never gives in”—more than many Time Lords. I think many millions of his fans will remember and cherish when the Doctor was him. • HAMISH CRAWFORD
Klingon Opera (A Rory Williams Tale) One friend told me he felt it wrong that Rory wasn’t the companion from Series 5’s beginning, nevermind Moffat
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 interrupting his run by repeatedly killing him. Personally I felt Rory was a gooseberry. Yes he’s Amy’s boyfriend, and it’s plausible she loved him and felt he’s right for her, being an insecure commitment-phobic. Perhaps Amy’s personality problems meant she worked with only select people one to one. Perhaps she and Smith worked as a pair better than with Rory too. The Ponds were the loveable misfits that discovered each other. I liked Rory initially. His clumsily fighting off a vampire with a broomstick. The natural follow-on to Amy seducing the Doctor. Like Mina seduced and half-turned by Dracula, reasserting her faithfulness to her fiancé by killing the vampire agent attacking him. Maybe I didn’t mind Rory so much as prefer Series 5’s earlier half. Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone remains my favourite Matt Smith story, though Day of the Doctor and Rings of Akhaten occasionally threaten to usurp it. I loved Amy’s Choice which suited their trio team dynamic like Genesis did Sarah and Harry and Enlightenment anomalously did Tegan and Turlough. Girl Who Waited did too. That beautiful emotional climax where older Amy begs Rory not to save her is as much his scene as hers.
His death and Amy’s numbed reaction in Amy’s Choice was perfect. Suddenly any
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insensitivity she’d shown Rory or recklessness with his heart was clearly her Peter Pan syndrome or heartfelt words she couldn’t say aloud for being too afraid or too autistic to understand her emotional centrality. Unfortunately they kept repeating it. In Cold Blood, Rory’s death should be fittingly tragic, an innocent killed in the crossfire of another petty war between man and Silurian the Doctor couldn’t peacefully resolve. But whilst Amy’s Choice was understated and yet thinly cutting and hard hitting in its cruel silence, this was nulling Chibnall sound and fury concluding plentiful suspect sentiments and cheap, calculating audience manipulations beforehand. It didn’t enhance the tragedy, it exhausted it. I didn’t care. Yet two episodes earlier I absolutely did in the same scenario. This got worse after The Big Bang. Maybe the wedding was a mistake. It makes sense though. Transitioning from young Amelia being told the Doctor’s bedtime story, to the woman putting away childish things, yet remembers back her childhood imaginary friend. But it requires the crack reopened by Amy’s will (like Gwyneth opening the rift to the Gelth) presumably at her house, whereupon off-screen the Doctor escapes, changes clothed, then materialises there in wedding getup. It would’ve made more televisual sense having the crack open at the reception and showing us the TARDIS escape through it. But Moffat apparently judged it better he arrives appropriately dressed. The other problem is Rory shouldn’t remember being an Auton, any more than Hartnell’s Doctor should remember being a Dalek duplicate. The same issue bugged me about the Red Dwarf episode Timeslides where Rimmer all too briefly is alive again having changed his personal history. He shouldn’t be
Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 ecstatic about being alive, nor remember his hologramatic self’s plan, because in his hologram’s words “I’m not really me. I’m a computer simulation of me.”
What do you do after making a married man of Rory? Well Moffat seemed to think you make a bloody Klingon of him next!
Auton Rory was a clone, a ganger almost. Sure it gives him affinity with the gangers’ plight in Series 6. But otherwise it’d be better if Amy and the Doctor alone knew Rory unknowingly in another life was her fiercely loyal protector, and thus had deepened affection for him. Instead it became Rory’s easy card to pull on her of “I’m more devoted to you because I spent 2000 years protecting you and waiting when you were in a box you were in because I shot you in the first place you selfish bitch!”
I liked Worf, and kinda liked DS9’s Dax (especially her roleplaying as an acerbic chary Romulan with Sisko in In The Pale Moonlight). However she’s easily the River Song of Trek.
This has come to bother me particularly in light of Angels Take Manhattan in the suggestion that Amy’s devotion to Rory should mean that she should prove equally madly suicidally devoted and jump and die with him for no reason and to no gain whatsoever if she can’t persuade him not to jump himself. I know this was a rehash of her leap of faith/despair in killing herself in the hope of breaking the illusion she couldn’t bear to be real in Amy’s Choice, but it made no emotional sense. Amy’s ultimatum of “together or not at all” should’ve realistically made Rory choose the latter. Not, under ANY circumstances, the former, since logically there’s no point in sacrificing himself for a dead wife anyway.
But I *really* hated Worf after Dax died and he used that as an excuse to be a colossal prick to everyone who liked her. Quite frankly he became a creep then, right down to his bizarre reverse-stalking of poor nervous Ezri.
In this light it felt somehow falsely armtwisted and coerced of her character, as well as his. Doing it because an unforgiving segment of the audience wanting her to pay her dues for her admittedly shabby treatment of Rory, demanded it of her, rather than because it was her character’s will to do it. I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to The Big Bang.
I hated when they became a couple and their tacky displays of flirtatious affection making me actually feel like a gooseberry. I even hated Tennant and Rose less and *they* made even my inner prudish anorak shout “Oh just shag and be done with it!”
But this was to prolong the mandatory seventh season with filler episodes, even filler arcs. I suspect there’s similar reasons Rory becomes uncomfortably like Worf from then on. Even in A Christmas Carol where he seems to be more concerned about reprimanding Kazran for possibly momentarily looking at Amy’s hardly remotely arousing grainy hologram’s skirt than that the starship they’re on’s crashing! And I know they’re married but Rory dropping a TARDIS cable in Space/Time because he momentarily spied up Amy’s knickerless skirt through the glass ceiling (oh how deep) is an indescribably icky and creepy piece of Moffat writing. I’m afraid much like Worf’s cold blooded murder or Weyoum, Season 6 saw the show lose its moral soul. Moffat seemed now so ashamed of the do-gooder old square Doctor that he made him instead
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 a hardened ruthless badass, and to River too, making it now impossible to buy the Doctor’s romance with someone so morally reprehensible as her gunslinging self. It’s been suggested this gun-chic posterboy/girl posturing is Moffat’s cynical selling to American audiences. Indeed that seems the only reason A Town Called Mercy exists at all. I don’t believe gun-chic and morality are necessarily mutually exclusive. Nikita’s the most beautiful moral film about a killer growing a conscience I’ve seen. Terminator 2’s a morality play about the worth of human life. Aliens is about the victimised becoming strong enough to protect innocents. But as Cameron had his utterly cold blooded and insanely right wing True Lies turn, and the coldly, crassly manipulative Titanic, so Moffat’s soul took a fall here. Time of Angels’ cliffhanger resolution and Hurt’s ‘No More’ message blasting demonstrated Moffat’s Doctor using a gun intelligently and pro-life. Frankly if suckered American gun-nuts learned something enlightening through watching, good. Unfortunately Series 6 pushed the gunchic beyond its limit (wait what am I saying? Resurrection of the Daleks would have felt right at home there). Day of the Moon’s resolution was even a crass justification for America’s gun culture’s existence. Much like Independence Day was a crass justification for having a ridiculous military budget. I don’t actually take umbrage with the Doctor doing this to the Silents, despite it making a colossal hypocrite of him for his reprimanding of Ambrose. The fact is they’re a dominant predator with every advantage over us meaning we have no
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means of defence against the unseen unmemorable enemy they are. If their superior tyranny was benevolent that’d be one thing, but we see they have, just for sport, murdered humans like that harmless older woman in the bathroom who was no threat to them at all, just because they can. But the Doctor’s actions are justified in giving mankind a fighting chance against an enemy they can’t and shouldn’t accommodate. The problem is, well it’d make far more sense to have him do this immediately after Amy’s abduction rather than having him wait to act whilst listening to her palm transmitter as she’s terrified and tormented by these creatures. Having him be so callous and then having him orchestrate the Silents’ massacre is a bit like the Sixth Doctor killing Shockeye in revenge for the death of Oscar he seemingly didn’t care about anyway. But that was seemingly written so we could get the contrived soap opera rubbish of Rory overhearing Amy talk of her besotted love of the centuries’ old man with the box in frustratingly contrived terms no real person ever would, just so Rory’s left feeling jealous before learning she was talking about his Auton Centurion self, not the Doctor. Because apparently that’s more important than that his wife’s being fucking tortured! Hmm, Moffat must really hate twoparters if he’s forced to pad them with mawkish garbage like this. Now, the scene where Rory finally succumbs to the Doctor’s force of authority and his trust and steps away and lets go of the bogus Amy is beautifully done in regards Rory himself. But as for next episode, I often criticise Bad Wolf for the moment Eccleston snaps at the Controller for suggesting
Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Rose’s death doesn’t matter, despite the fact he knows she’s an abused, emotionally stunted child with her capacity for human empathy robbed of her when aged five.
Rory was aiming for by insinuating the Doctor might’ve been the real father. Moffat really doesn’t get the difference between smart writing and smartarsed does he?
But at least the writer seemingly knew this. Moffat seemingly has us believe behind the Cybermen’s ‘blank looks’ they’re shitting themselves at the Doctor’s explosions.
But it’s also that he badly needs a script editor to in this case tell him he should cut this and replace it with the similar scene with the Dalek in Wedding and have it make much more sense, since everyone knows the only safe Dalek’s a dead Dalek.
Larry Miles once suggested Moffat’s closet anorak will deliberately get the show’s facts wrong to avoid seeming nerdish. It just serves to boost Rory’s machoness as moronically and implausibly as For The Uniform did for Sisko. Like Warriors’ Doctor suddenly out the blue holding grudges on the Silurian’s behalf, despite being perfectly chummy with the Brigadier immediately beforehand. I guess the implication is the Doctor, like any typical bloke will, if he’s pissed off, pick a fight with an old enemy who had nothing to do with wronging him this time on the way to save the day. Perhaps a galaxy-monitoring Cyberfleet of that size, gathering intelligence was amassing for invasion and had to be destroyed anyway, but the script doesn’t say so. Most frustratingly though if Rory should be having a go at anyone it’s the Doctor. Why don’t we open on him shouting at the Doctor at how could he murder Amy’s ganger in cold blood when she shared Amy’s soul and memories, and was their only link to finding the real Amy? So the Doctor can give the answers we desperately want to ask him about why, or how he can know for sure that what he did wasn’t murder? Supposedly the beauty of Rory is that he can challenge the Doctor over his actions. But no, we had to have that narration just to further confuse the focus of what
The problem is once you’ve made Rory that implausibly invincibly badass it just becomes hopelessly out of synch with his more human realistic fear reactions and timidness elsewhere. Like his nervousness with a gun when pistolwhipping Hitler or well-timed punching out that officer on motorbike. Or indeed his nervous trying to appease a homicidal Dalek he thinks is asking for “eggs”. Or his beautiful vulnerability in Girl Who Waited.
But even his badassery in enduring the Silent’s lethal eyepatch currant to fight them off for Amy’s sake becomes redundant when she just lets rip on them with a machine gun anyway (actually that was kinda hot!). I’ll discuss my issues with that Chibnall penned awkward moment when Rory’s dad letches at Amy elsewhere. But for me the Ponds should’ve left on A Good Man Goes To War. Preferably with Amy
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 moved to hug her found daughter as they all teleport home. Because apart from anything else, If Rory’s the kind of husband who’ll go on the warpath and blow up a Cyberfleet over Amy’s abduction but is all “Nevermind. Where’s our next adventure to” about Melody’s abduction, something’s not working here • THOMAS COOKSON
Memories of Matt Smith The Eleventh Doctor is dead – it’s time for the postmortem. Things really seemed to come together for Matt Smith in the Seventh Season. The cool new TARDIS set, the gothic style coat and tails, motorcycles, falling leaves, shouting at planets, the Daleks, back and more badass than everN Oh, and I don’t care what the Internet says; I thought The Rings of Akhaten was awesome. th
Who watched the 50 Anniversary special and preferred Eleven over Ten? I’ll raise my hand – and I didn’t even feel a sense of betrayal! As for the finaleNmagnificent. I didn’t even know that I needed a wooden Cyberman in my life until I had one shoot flames out of my television screen. The regeneration scene was touching, perhaps my favourite speech in Doctor Who, of all time. ThenNwhoosh! Matt Smith was gone in a flash. I was left wanting more. I will miss his Doctor terribly.
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Because this is a postmortem though, I have to ask the difficult questions too (with surgical gloves on and everything). Why did it take me so long to warm to this Doctor? Seasons Five and Six had their moments, certainly, but if I were to choose an adjective to describe them, it would be ‘difficult.’ Bang, crash, wallop – here comes another random plot thread – pay attention folks! It’ll all pay off when you tune into Episode Twenty-Seven, in a background conversation between River Song and a Silurian Priest, whilst Doctor Who saves a space whale from the captaincy of a spaceshipN Whatever Steven Moffat was smoking for those first two seasons – pass it round. My head was spinning faster than an acid-exposed Kroton. Moffat needn’t have got so anxious about writing for his very first Doctor. Consequently, it’s the stories by other writers I remember most vividly: Vincent and the Doctor by Richard Curtis, The Doctor’s Wife by Neil Gaiman, and Amy’s Choice by Simon Nye come to mind. Given the slow start, I would have loved to spend time with this Doctor for one more season. But then again, I say that about all the Doctors. I miss them all. Post Mortem over: cause of death, old age apparently. Oh, and that crack in timeNI will have to keep up. I hope The Silence don’t come back, they were rubbish. • BILL TYRELL (@billytyrell)
Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15
Welcome To The Future (Or Where’s The Money Gone?)
After watching the Anniversary Special and seeing all the wonderful reviews, I could only think about one thing– Surely now, the future of Doctor Who has been secured for the next decade? Don’t hold me to that, but I just can’t see it going away any time soon. We’ve already passed the 10-year mark since Doctor Who went into production and it’s as popular as it’s ever been, if you consider the strides it has made worldwide. We had ‘Dr. Who. WOW!’ comments on Twitter in about 10 different languages, and the same number replying with ‘It’s DOCTOR Who, you idiot’. Yes, we may have the odd ‘hiatus’ somewhere down the line, but with Peter Capaldi currently filming his first series, the feeling of a hopeful new start hangs around fandom. I firmly believe that Capaldi’s name won’t just attract new viewers to Doctor Who – but a higher calibre of actor as well. People who may know him, or people who know of his work and want to work with him. But will the same be said for the rest of the production? Will we attract the best creative people to bring the best out of those scripts? And...will the money be made available to allow those people to make the best episode they can? I’ve seen that this fanzine likes to have a go at the BBC for using Doctor Who to make money (and we’ll continue to do so - Ed), but when you look at it, it’s that money that keeps the attention going and keeps the grubby hands of highly-paid executives off the cancellation button. Non Doctor Who fans like to point at the programme and moan that it gets all the money from the licence fee. But is Doctor Who really getting it’s fair share? For one of the most profitable – and longest-running BBC ‘products’ – I’m not sure it does. There seems to be this trend in television where production costs are kept to a minimum so maximum profit can be made. Then there’s another argument (which I feel is extremely valid) as to why BBC Worldwide should be contributing more than they already do to the stretched publicly-funded BBC. Profit-upon-profit they seem to make, but yet the BBC is struggling to buy superglue to stick on a Dalek eye-stork. I want Doctor Who to be more ambitious. Personally, I think the recent series has been okay but that’s just it, it’s okay. It isn’t progressing as it should be, that’s my opinion of course but I’ve seen many a person air the same views, which led to me writing this bollocks. The Day of The Doctor was fantastic because it went for it, it had a proper budget assigned and Steven Moffat could write whatever he felt was best. He should not worrying about cutting things out of scripts to save money – that money should be made available for him to make the best story possible.
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 Personally, I’m a fan of bringing back serialised stories, which can only help to produce a more well-rounded story and characters (oh and save a bit of money too!) But the most recent alarming example of lack of budget was Neil Gaiman’s episode, Nightmare in Sliver. Like in The Doctor’s Wife, the budget simply couldn’t handle what Gaiman had in mind and had to be re-written several times. They got away with it in The Doctor’s Wife, but Nightmare In Sliver, in my view, fell flat on its face. I remember hearing an interview with producer Julie Gardner a few years ago when she said that each episode cost roughly a million pounds. Presumably, this must have slightly risen over the years, but looking at new episodes from the last few years, I don't think things have changed that much. It seems that Steven Moffat is trying to run the show with one hand tied behind his back at the moment – and If you factor in the money that Doctor Who makes worldwide, I'm not sure the budget it receives is high enough to push the show to the next level. Surely if the BBC want to sell more Doctor Who, it needs to be as good as it possibly can be, and I just don't think it is at the moment, purely because it's hamstrung by the budget. Doctor Who is something that can be anything and go anywhere. Let’s hope we see some of that this year. • STEVE JAMES
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15
Big Buster’s
Doctor Who Quiz 2
Former Teletext child-star-turned slightly-annoying adult, Buster Boozler, is back with another set of questions for you to test your grey matter against. To avoid potential legal proceedings, Buster is known in this fanzine as Big Buster, because he’s slightly older and in no way connected with the youngster from the sadly-lamented Teletext quiz that we haven’t heard of before, despite mentioning what we have done above. Anyway, here are his questions Q1. What was the name of Peter Capaldi’s Oscar-winning Short? Q2. What were the names of Frobisher’s (Peter Capaldi) daughters in Torchwood: Children of Earth? Q3. Who directed Torchwood: Children of Earth? Q4. What was the occupation of Tom Baker’s character in The Vault of Horror? Q5. Which is the only broadcast year that a Doctor Who (2005-present) episode hasn’t featured the talents of in-house monster man, Paul Kasey? Bonus Question: If you own a onesie, destroy it immediately, deduct yourself 2 points and have a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror. They are for babies. Love, Buster x (answers on Page 37)
CONTRIBUTE TO FISH FINGERS AND CUSTARD! If you fancy seeing your work in a future issue, please drop us an e-mail at fishcustardfanzine@googlemail.com - as you tell from this mess – we’ll take everything and anything (but if you want to review the new series – we’d love you for it. Not real love. Internet love) 33
Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15
(Ian Levine's) Shada Shada: the Douglas Adams' penned unfinished finale story from Tom Baker's penultimate season as the Doctor. It's a story that, despite famously being left unfinished on television, now has perhaps more versions of it in more mediums than any other Doctor Who story ever made. Yet one version of the story in particular has drawn quite a bit of attention and controversy in the circles of Doctor Who fans. It's a version of Shada that isn't one produced officially and, for that matter, never really released to the public at large. That would be the much talked about, little seen version financed and produced by the equally controversial Ian Levine. For those who need background on this particular version of Shada (and Levine in particular), I'd recommend an earlier piece I wrote for this very fanzine “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Ian Levine?” in issue 12. However I'll give a quick summary: Levine is a music producer as well as both a fan of Doctor Who and, between 1980 and 1986, it's unofficial continuity supervisor. In recent years he has taken on a number of privately financed projects to animate a number of missing and unmade stories from across the history of the series but none would have a higher profile than Shada. Costing £24,500, Levine brought together nearly the entire surviving supporting cast of the story (the notable exception of Tom Baker who, once again depending on where you ready, was either unaffordable or uninterested) to create audio for un-filmed scenes while also bringing together a team of animators to animate them during 2010 and 2011. News of the project, and Levine's intention to present to the team behind the DVD releases for no charge, leaked out onto various Doctor Who forums and saw an ongoing conflict between both Levine and his supporters with fans who questioned both the quality of the production and the logic of producing it unofficially with the intention of presenting it for official release in the future. Nevertheless, Levine presented it to 2 Entertain shortly after it was completed in September of 2011. Late the following month, 2 Entertain announced that the Levine animation would not be included on their planned DVD set containing the story. That set, containing the 1992 VHS reconstruction with Tom Baker’s linking narration as well as numerous extras, was released first in the UK and then the US in early 2013. No reasons were given for its rejection though speculation was rife with debates about whether it was the quality of it, its lack of Tom Baker, the fact that it was done without any kind of permission or any number of other issues. For his part, Levine stated on numerous occasions that, citing reasons of copyright issues as well as not wishing to jeopardize his relationship with the DVD team and the BBC, the only way his version of Shada would see
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 the light of the day would be on a future official release and would not be made available any other way. That, as well as Levine's comments in a three hour interview with the DWO Whocast, seemed to be the last word on the subject with only a couple of reviews (such as that written by J.R. Southall for the Starburst magazine and website) being the only record of it. That was until October 2013 when, unexpectedly, it leaked onto at least one major torrenting site. The exact details of that leak are unknown to this writer but events such as the circumstances surrounding the leak of another Levine financed animation (that of the missing episode Mission To The Unknown) and the username of the person who uploaded it onto a site being “IanLevine�, suggests the strong possibility one of the animators involved with the project might have been responsible for putting it online. By doing so, they have made certain that those who could find it, would do so and be able to judge it at last. The first thing that jumps out about this version of Shada is that it effectively cobbles together its new elements (such as the animation and the occasional new CGI shot) with the footage as presented in the 1992 reconstruction While that might on the surface sound like a neat solution to the missing scenes issue, it is in fact the start of the problems with this version. In going down that route to complete the story, it means that its success is entirely down to two things. The first is the quality of the new voice-work from the original cast alongside necessary replacements for those either no longer with us or unwilling to take part. The second is the quality of the animation itself. If those elements are not up to scratch, then the entire thing becomes as fragile as a house of cards on a windy day. That fact alone is the biggest problem this production has. There are three major pieces of recasting. The most obvious is Tom Baker, replaced here by Paul Jones who Levine asserted in his interview with the DWO Whocast was more than up to the task and cited none other than Lalla Ward's comments about how good he was. Being able to hear him in action though cast serious doubts on that though. Jones' performance completely lacks Tom Baker's particular nuances or indeed match the depth of Baker's voice. The fact that, from part two onwards, it frequently cuts back and forth between the real Baker in 1979 and Jones, highlights the issues even more. Jones does an okay job of impersonating Baker but the fact of the matter is that's all it is: an okay impersonation job. The other two recasting's are interesting in their own right. Because of the way Adams' wrote Shada, most of scenes with the late Denis Carey as Chronotis were already filmed by the time the production was scrapped in 1979 but a few scenes set on Shada itself were left unfilmed so for those scenes he has been replaced with Steven O’Donnell. As a result, the role O'Donnell plays isn't a big one but considering that means that he doesn't have many lines at all, O'Donnell sounds nothing like Carey at all. More successful is John Leeson, the original voice of K9, returning to fill in scenes where his replacement David Brierley didn't record dialogue in 1979. Given that Brierley was doing an impression of Leeson to begin with, it's good to have the original actor back though it does make for some rather interesting moments when the occasional cut happens back and forth between the two of them. By and large though, Levine succeed in getting the original cast back together. Lalla Ward, Daniel Hill and Victoria Burgoyne all returned to their 1979 roles while perhaps the biggest
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 surprise was the return of Christopher Neame to the role of the story villainous Skagra. Being the original cast, they are of course reprising their roles instead of having to replace someone else and they do quite well given the passing of more than three decades. Ward's voice is still quite close to what it was in 1979 and, given she had not only played Romana in the 2003 Big Finish/BBCi Shada as well as numerous other Big Finish stories, seems to easily slip right back into the role. Much the same can be said for Hill and Burgoyne both though Burgoyne's performance in particular seems to have been greatly improved by the passing of time. The one performance I have reservations about is Neame's Skagra. Skagra was never going to be Doctor Who's most subtle villain and while the original 1979 performance has its share of over the top moments, Neame's more recent performance is almost nothing but those moments now. Perhaps that's what his performance would have been then had we gotten the chance to see it, it's hard to tell. What is clear is that Levine's efforts to bring them together certainly paid off in his attempt to complete the story. Which brings us to the animation itself. Levine brought together a team of animators for the project and that's an important fact to keep in mind in looking at the project as a whole. Despite having a team working on it, its clearly a whole in that the characters and sets all look the same throughout. It's not as though different artists are doing different sections of it as can happen in comics or in animated anthologies like Batman: Gotham Knight or the Animatrix. In that regard at least, the animation works. Where the animation has issues in terms of its quality. As a result of being somewhat patchwork by definition, how good the animation is differs from scene to scene and sometimes even moment to moment within a scene. Take the book at the heart of the story: The Ancient And Worshipful Law Of Gallifrey. Depending on the scene (and therefore who is animating it) the dimensions of this 5x7 book change dramatically, as does whatever shade of red it happens to be between scenes. How that inanimate (no pun intended) object is variously rendered is a good example of the ever shifting animation quality. There are times when the animation looks good, especially when it is kept simple and characters aren't have to do much. When they start moving and interacting though, the animation can be stiff with the movement of arms and legs appearing to be more akin to moveable parts on a paper doll than fluid character movement. In other places, the animation is more akin to “Doctor Who On Ice� with characters appearing to ice skate across a room rather than walk across it. The results then are very mixed indeed. What highlights all of the problems, both with the voice-work and the animation, is the fact that this version combines it with the 1979 footage. While various stories with missing episodes have been released with episodes being animated alongside their surviving live action counterparts, none have been released as a mix. Not even Tenth Planet, where the regeneration itself survived, made the transition between the two. Looking at this production, it isn't hard to see why for if some found that going from an animated episode to an live action one jarring, imagine doing that transition within an episode (and that becoming more and more often as it goes along). As a result of the aforementioned, as well as all of the issues of the hype and controversy, this version of Shada is rather hard to judge. To compare it with the other official animations, such as Scream Of The Shalka or the various missing episode reconstructions, certainly doesn't do it much favors. Of those, the easiest to compare it to would be what was done for The Ice Warriors which had its own animation style compared with paper dolls in some quarters. Given the ever shifting quality of the animation, once imagines that fact alone would have led many to dismiss it outright or even make it a
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15 source of criticism about the DVD release (especially given its fairly hefty suggested retail price). Given that it was meant to be presented as a finished product, the Levine Shada instead feels much more like a rough cut with more work needing to be done to it. What it is perhaps better seen as then is as a fan production for which it's a good effort. One need only look on sites like Youtube to see fan animations of varying quality from the simplest attempts to quite polished productions. Compared to those, the Levine Shada looks quite good even with the issues it has as it stands presently. That said though, there is a gap between the amateur and the professional that this falls between as it strives to be one or other and ultimately succeeds as neither. As a result, I can't blame Dan Hall or the DVD team for rejecting it for the DVD release. It isn't clear whether the quality of the animation and voice work done for it was a determining factor in the decision to not include it but, having had the chance to view it in its entirety, its clear how hard it is to ignore those issues. In the final analysis, however good it might be as a fan production, it is to a certain extent a project that turned out to be heavy on hype while coming up a tad short on actual substance. Aren't all dreams though? • MATTHEW KRESAL
Big Buster’s Quiz Answers: Q1: Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life Q2: Holly and Lily Q3: Euros Lyn Q4: Artist Q5: 2012
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15
‘Androzani’ in Minor Two spherical bodies in this galaxy hover closely to each other – Androzani Minor (the smaller, you see) and Major (more like a big brother). On the former of these a Police Box appears Gradually ‘vworp vworp’ing into existence. The occupants peer, for there’s not much to see, Just miles of rock in the distance. The Doctor, fair-haired with a soft boyish grin, starts talking so fast you can’t fathom. “The planet is prone to big gravity shifts, with mud baths the horrible outcome.” Young Peri Brown picks up some glass that she’s found and observes flame has fused to it tri-silicate. But on Androzani there’s more riches around Guns! Drugs! And gruff Stotzi is peddling it! He’s a bad ‘un to be sure, this ugly man Stotzi, who gun runs in the caves of Androzani. For a fast buck there is nothing that he would not do, why, he’d happily sell his own granny. (Pursuing this man, and Sharaz Jek, the scientist who’s Stotzi’s chief ally, is a soldier so dense he thinks you disappear if you so much as walk out of his eyeline.) So it’s really no wonder that in these dark caves Stotz and Jek can run drugs with abandon. But the leaders of Earth, like Tri Morgus (the swine!) don’t themselves have one leg to stand on. For Stotzi is really in Morgus’ pay, to get closer and closer to Jek. But when that happens, oh hideous day, what glorious vengeance be wrecked! Into this play our two heroes stray, heedless of all risk or danger. Stung, poised and slapped is the order of the day, but Jek’s motives, well that’s a bit stranger – He rescues the twosome from firing squad, to lust and drool over Peri. And just when you think he can’t get more odd, he ups the weird factor to ‘Very’!
For this Jek person fears his own body, you see, burnt and disfigured in fire. So he struts around safely in black PVC with Morgus the brunt of his ire. “That degenerate swine!” he rants and raves, “That pernicious blackguard most smelly! I’ll reduce his brain to a bloody mashed pulp and boil down his guts to make jelly!” The Doctor fast realises the pickle he’s in and shoots out of Jek’s cell like a dart. He then overcomes the droid guarding him, confusing it with his two hearts. But out of the pan and into the fire he runs into Stotzi’s tough men. He’s chained up and whisked away in the gunrunners’ ship, But he cleverly crash-lands it again! PEOW! - BANG! - WHIZ! - KABLAM! The Doc is chased o’r craggy hills. “I’m sorry Peri, I’ve failed you,” he wails, But wait! Jackig can cure all her ills! “He knew his stuff, Jackig,” the Doc is emphatic, “I’ll stuff some of the cure in my hat.” And where to procure this magical potion? From the tit of a withered Queen Bat. Then it all proceeds to go to hell Morgus, Jek, Stotz and the soldiers, they all kill each other, bells tolling Death’s knell. Even the Magma Beast’s killed by some boulders. There remains one more twist in this horrible tale of revenge, death, payback and murder. The Doctor spills most of Prof. Jackig’s cure. “Don’t die, Doc!” Peri wails – he’s not heard her... ...for his head is a’swinging and crashing about, old friends say “hang on!” in his noggin. And when this vision screams to its colourful end BANG he sits up and he’s Colin.
By David MacGowan
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15
Thrifty Fives 5 Things That Will DEFINITELY Happen In The New Series
5 Things That Cost More Than A Episode of Doctor Who
• There’ll be a reference to The Doctor looking older • There’ll be a reference to The Doctor being Scottish • Graham Norton will pop up somewhere • Somebody will reveal a massive spoiler • Fans will moan about it
• A BBC employees car • 1 minute of The Voice • The title sequence in Game of Thrones • A BBC employees court case • BBC employees train fares
5 Phrases You Can Say In America Without Your ‘Mom’ Giving You A Slap • “I’ve got a sore fanny” • “What a bummer” • “You’re so full of spunk this morning” • “May I borrow Dad’s suspenders?” • “I’ve just had a pee in the bathroom” 5 Top Snacks To Watch Doctor Who With • Chocolate Buttons • Kebab • Strawberry Shoelaces • 6-pack of Twix • Jelly Babies 5 Slogans From The Anniversary • Cup-a-Soup • Do You Have Wi-Fi? • Popcorn Killer • I Don’t Wanna Go • Bye, One Direction
5 Reasons Why You SHOULDN’T Go And Watch Doctor Who At The Cinema • It’s expensive, when you are already paying for it to be on your telly • There will be people who don’t laugh at a reference from The Space Pirates • You’ll be besieged with poor merchandise • You’ll probably be body-searched – so you can’t sneak any drinks in. (But a mobile phone or Swiss army knife is ok, apparently) • It won’t start EXACTLY on time 5 Things John Barrowman DEFINITELY does • Jazz hands in the mirror of a morning • Blows a kiss at himself in the mirror of a morning • Goes to bed with one of those green face masks on • Irons his underwear • Takes his secret family bowling and moans about the price for a family of 4
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Fish Fingers and Custard Issue 15
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